Signe Coda
by Deathofme
Summary: They say the beginning is like the end. The events leading up to Erik's death.


**A/N **Dedicated to my lovely parodic angel. Rated M for sex/violence grossness, not so graphic. Angst alert ahoy, and please enjoy the fic. Leave a review, it keeps a writer happy!

* * *

They say that the beginning is just like the end.

Nothing truer could have been said about Erik. Upon his conception his mother consumed an abortive substance, which gave in his premature birth, a wave of blood and the certainty that he was dead. However, the ugly child pulled from his mother's womb was not dead and though, squalling, it clung to its mother in desperation though no embrace was returned.

He remembered the fabric of her dress, the dress she wore was plain for neither her nor his father were rich. His father was never present though, and so any money he made the pair of them never saw and was squandered away on drink. The dress was rough linen and though it was abrasive, it was the only thing of his mother that he could touch without her cringing and slapping him away, and so he clung to it desperately, always, hiding his face with it. When she tired of him, and could no longer recoil from visceral disgust she would try and be rid of the clinging parasite, and in childish fear he would only dig into the folds of her dress with more fervor.

Which was probably how she got the idea for his mask.

She did try to love him, she tried with every fiber of being to look upon him and see nothing but a child, her son. However something instinctual held her back and after a moment she could no longer bear to look at him, the very product of her shame and lost love. It seemed every evil, every sin she had committed in loving his father manifested physically into her hideous burden, and no matter how hard she tried to love her baby, she couldn't. The mask, was perhaps, the only thing she could truly do for her son out of love. She cut up her dress, giving up her one, clean garment, and sewed it with much care and precision. For when he looked up at her, his face buried in the linen, she could see the shaping of a beautiful face, the marred flesh hidden from view. He had his father's eye.

So that's how his childhood progressed, equally loved and shunned by his mother. Mixed, confusing messages when his mother would look upon him gladly and treat him gently, and then the moments when she could only gaze upon him with disgust and tried to distance herself as much as she could.

She died in a mental institution some years later. And while he was wandering the streets for food he was picked up by the gypsy circus.

* * *

When Erik let Christine go and fled the opera house, he wandered the catacombs destitute. He had poked his head out into the cold Parisian air, but the wind was bitter and his nostrils breathed suffocating air, filling his throat with fear and he could barely breathe. It was the first time he had felt cool air upon his face.

He grabbed a two penny whore off the streets a fortnight later. He had found a relatively dry part of the catacombs, far away from his old home. She looked nothing like Christine, but her hair...her hair curled in just the right way.

He had slowly been losing his grip on his mind. He had always lived with dementia and insanity for all his life, but now his memory lacked and he could not tell what was dream and what had happened. He held the whore to him, who had been quite a fight and left a cut on his brow, pressed hard against him as if he were trying to mold the shape of her body into his to remember in his muscles.

"Sing...sing Christine."

She had cried the entire time, her voice thick through her tears and sobs and over and over she cried that she was not Christine, that she was not the woman he sought, but heady drunk on the name alone Erik had not listened and swayed gently to and fro instead to some internal music.

"Sing..."

She screamed then, she screamed something terrible. It was ugly and cut through the air and it was full of fear. The noise was so ugly to him Erik clapped a hand to his ear and desperate to stop the sound he grabbed her by the hair and snapped her neck. She crumpled to his feet and still, with those curls entangled between his fingers, he looked at her with horror.

He had killed Christine, or so he thought. Driven by madness he fled the opera house, the catacombs of Paris finally, away from the only semblance of kindness he had ever known.

* * *

"We could have you rut with one of our animals, a beast and beast spectacle. It would draw the better crowds, the drunken ones who love to see anything bawdy, and they will think it is the most fantastical thing they've ever seen, they'll roar with wonder and throw more coin than they intend. It'll be better for you, the more money you make, the more we can feed you."

Erik's breathing was tinged with illness that comes with old age and infirmity. He had hid himself deep in the woods, traveling until his rich clothing became rags and somehow he knew where he was going, though his thoughts were consumed with the shame that he had killed Christine.

He was moving to the gypsy camp, they traveled everywhere but there were always old haunts they returned to. He stayed by the abandoned campsite until they came, he sang for his supper and seeing the most marvelous freak he was, they put him in his show. He didn't have the desire to fight them and allowed them this.

"Rut with the animals?"

Erik gave a fluttery laugh.

"I'm far too old for that now."

It was true. His body was now just a sad memory of what it once was in its prime. He had long since past his youth and even his voice had a tremor of weakness within it. Though it was still pretty enough to inspire people to throw him scraps.

"They'll throw lots of money anyways boy, just to see my face alone."

Erik left the gypsies when they had overstepped his welcome submission. He was old, and his days were sleepy and spent resting on the hay in the large, but flimsy cage they had created for him. When one of the boys tried to rouse him for the customers, none of his stick's prodding would stir Erik and finally the blow to his useless genitals woke Erik for one last song for the gypsies. All the strength he still possessed within him, he forced out of his lungs, ripping through his throat for a piercing, angry scale. He raped all their ears with sound and left in the ringing calm afterwards.

"The grave of Chagny, is it near by?"

Erik gave the coach driver a dangerous grin, made eerier for the fact that no mask hided his deformity and all his teeth could be seen on the marred side of his face, as if he were a rotting skeleton.

"Don't try my patience, you can drive me there, or you can die."

Acid dripped out of every word he said, and even though Erik showed no weapon the driver believed him and closed the private curtains of the carriage to hide his unsightly client, and drove him to the Chagny cemetery.

Erik fell to his knees when he saw the headstone and the engraving of the dead in the ground below. He looked at the years and the time worn on the picture and something connected in his mind.

"So I didn't kill you after all...I must have let you go..."

Erik felt a laugh force its way out of his throat and his painfully clenched teeth. He hissed his laugh through his clenched teeth and fell against the headstone, his bones weak with rheumatism and his muscles beginning to rot like his face.

"So I let you live after all..."

Erik felt like his death was upon him, and he sighed and sank against the grave. He wanted to sleep there, sleep there in the snow and never wake up again, but after a moment of drinking the cool stone through his scarred face, he heaved himself up again. Someone would lie there, beside Christine upon their death, but if he let her go, that meant the coveted place didn't belong to him, and so he would have to go. Now knowing he had let her go once before, it wasn't so hard for him to let go again.

He took her ring with him, though. It was the one thing he allowed himself to have. He walked away, because he knew there was a place like this for him, but it wasn't here, his feet knew where to go.

* * *

"I forgive you, but I know you don't forgive me."

Erik wished he could have pretended that his mother's quiet little grave answered otherwise, but all pretenses he had about her would have to go now. Her love was the one thing he would have treasured most, and what he had been searching for his entire, sorry life.

He sat in the graveyard of the mental asylum, he knew the guards were going to come round to check and see if there were any escapees and he thought he would just sit there in dignity and let them find him. But when he saw the first flickers of torch light and the whistles of song, his old fear seized up inside him again. He couldn't be seen, he couldn't be seen...

Erik ran, he didn't know where to, until he found the street and the garbage left behind on the dirty road. There was burlap sacking, and after swallowing Christine's ring which he had kept tucked away in his hair for so long it seemed to have melded with his skull, for he knew the asylum workers would take it away, he tied the sacking around his face and scurried back to his mother's grave.

The workers found him and decided he would be their newest patient, and indeed he fit quite nicely with the other crazies. It was where his mother had lived and died, and now he was coming to continue her legacy. He only grew violent when the doctors and wardens tried to remove the sacking, and they left it alone. Otherwise he led his quiet existence in the asylum, in his little cell. He never spoke and he never sang again.

The ring he swallowed was encrusted with hard diamonds, and whenever it passed through his system it cut up more and more of his innards, but he continued to swallow it diligently every time it surfaced in his pot. It sped up his aging and soon his bowel movements were painful and bloody and he rarely ate to try and lessen the pain.

It was after an ordeal of passing blood with his urine when the bird flew in through his tiny window. It was so very small he marveled that it could fly and it sang one clear note, nestled between his hands, before going stiff and closing its eyes, the last breath of life gone from its tiny body. Erik kept the dead bird with him, fighting temptation to swallow it like his ring, and only let up when the orderlies beat him to take it away after it began to rot and stink.

He spent many years in that asylum. He outlived the Count de Chagny who eventually followed his wife and made his earthy bed beside her in the ground. When Erik felt like it was time, he worked his one last bit of magic, and sprung himself free from his cell, which he could have done many years before.

He walked through the little graveyard, a dump where all the people the world forgot about received one, last monument and he found his mother's tomb. His body shrunk and wrinkled with bygone years, his eyes dull and myopic and his insides faring no better with Christine's hard little gift perpetually cutting him on the inside.

He kept the sacking on his face. He thought she would have appreciated it.

He hugged the cold stone to his shivering, wasted body and clung to it as if nothing else mattered. And nothing else did. This was what he had been looking for his entire life, and now finally, his mother could not refuse him. Never again could she turn away, or move from him. She would never be able to reject his love now and though the stone scraped his skin raw, Erik rubbed his face into it as hard as he could and he could almost smell the old linen of her dress.

The orderlies were efficient and they discovered he had escaped only a half hour afterwards. They ran out to the grounds and saw him by the grave. They were about to rush up and bring him back inside when Erik's body trembled and his mouth parted. After many years of still, his vocal cords began to vibrate and hum once more and with his last breath he let out one final note, long, clarion and final.

"Lo...what does 'lo' mean?"

"Love. He said love."

* * *

END 


End file.
